Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday that regulators must move ahead on ways to prevent a future financial crisis from occurring even as they battle one that threatens to plunge the country into recession.

“We do not have the luxury of waiting for markets to stabilize before we think about the future,” Bernanke said in a speech in Richmond.

Those recommendations were put forward after spreading problems in the housing and credit markets threatened to paralyze the entire financial system, which could devastate the national economy.

“Many of the necessary changes that have been identified, including increasing transparency, improving risk management and attaining better coordination among regulators could provide important support to the process of normalizing our financial markets,” Bernanke said.

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He said the president advisory group’s recommendations, if implemented, would guard against future financial troubles.